Fallout Factory: Miner’s Strike Exhibition 1984/85

Exhibition of Photographs on the 30th Anniversary of the 1984-1985 Miner’s Strike byReportdigital.co.ukThirty years ago Margaret Thatcher hoped to transform Britain into a “Greed is Good” society, “The method is economics” proposed Thatcher “but the aim is to change the soul”. To do so the Conservative government declared war on the trade unions. They implemented a secret plan to take on the unions one by one, until they came to the National Union of Mineworkers. In March 1984 the government provoked a strike – expecting victory in a few weeks. The strike lasted 12 months. They were to be demonised and discredited by the media. Isolated, beaten and starved back to work – yet despite desperate circumstances and in the face of everything that the government could throw at them, 150,000 miners and their families fought back and very nearly won. In the years that followed, the most productive and efficient coal industry in the world was closed and whole communities were destroyed, wages were widely repressed, industry, utilities and housing privatised and the City of London deregulated… creating the seeds of the crisis we now face.

A small group of photographers stood alongside the miners as they struggled for their jobs and communities and endeavoured to picture it from their point of view. This exhibition shows you some of the best of those pictures.